Wednesday, 26 April 2017

RECENT FILMS

MUSTANG

This came out last year and was nominated for an Oscar for
best foreign film. It was on in the tiny cinema in Ambleside, so we went.

It is a story of suppression set in Turkey, probably in the
south nr Antalya, by the sea. The narrative outline is soon . . . what? . . .
adumbrated by the family dynamic: an unmarried middle-aged uncle, an elderly
widowed grandmother who has taken the sisters in and largely lives under the
thumb of her son, saidunmarried uncle,
and five pretty girls all orphans, coming up to puberty. Okay, rather
contrived. The girls are accused of flirting with local boys and we see the
event: as they are going home from school, they horse around with the boys in
the class and get soaked in the sea. Wet t-shirt stuff. A surly neighbour
reports all this to the gran who decides to ground the girls but when the uncle
hears about it, he decides to lock them up, imprison them effectively, in their
room. With steel bars at the windows.

There is a strong sense of intimacy between the sisters: even
when imprisoned, they are tactile with one another, playful completely
unsophisticated and ingenuous in one another’s company. This gives we the
audience some lovely scenes of the girls which in turn makes what happens next,
all the more unbearable.

At first we see the narrowness of their gaolers thinking;
soon they are being married-off, at sixteen, even fifteen, to young men they
have never even met before, older, working, serious, not the schoolboys we saw
them having fun with earlier. This is the solution: get them married while they
are still virgins and the ‘problem’ will disappear.

I liked it a lot. Wouldn’t have given it 5* but four would
be about right. Critics seem divided about the contrived story-line and the
inevitable plot-holes such a narrative will unavoidably produce. One reviewer
claims it isn’t subtle enough but this is one of those times when tell not show
is the perfect approach.

I went to Antalya
once and to be honest didn’t find the population as conservative as they are
portrayed here; they receive millions of summer visitors from Europe plus as
well, many, many Turkish citizens work in Germany and surrounding countries and
they are very well aware of the liberated attitudes of young women. But that
isn’t what this film is about.

DEAD POOL

This might be the worst film I have ever seen.

Not even sure how to describe it without resorting to
adjectives such as excessive violence; unrestrained aggression; pornographic; profane
in the extreme: no sentence is spoken by anyone in the film without the word
fuck. You never get, ‘We’re out of milk, and I’m just walking across to the
shops to get more’. Every time it
becomes, ‘We’re out of fucking milk, I’m just walking across to the fucking shops
to get more’. God, it’s tedious. Was
that funny, by the way? Everyone but me thought it was hilarious.

I mean it is so far from any terms of reference I can
recognise or relate to and okay, adults clearly aren’t its core audience but
even making due allowance for all that, it is terrible within its own terms.
What I think it is trying to do is play on a theme of anti-Superhero so that
instead of say Batman saving the World and combating bad-guys intent on
destroying the World, Mr Pool has no such concerns. He is a Lad: chasing girls,
inhabiting bars; fighting [and picking
fights . . . very subversive for a Superhero]; boozing and being abusive to
every straight section of society. But . . . he does all of this to excess
using [in fact misusing] his superpowers.

Trouble here is I have never seen any X-Men films or real
Superhero films [Spiderman, for example] that this sets out to diss so I
don’t/can’t get the ironic humour and I am a million miles from the subculture
being referenced in the motormouth quips.

Eventually, one becomes aware of the homoerotic references.
In a scene in a bar he asks the bar tender for a blow-job and he is given some
kind of cocktail with whipped cream on top; turns out a blow-job means
different things to different people: it’s all about context. But the point is,
he asks the bar-man for the blow-job.
Really not sure what is going on with this, it occurs a lot although Pool is in
a relationship with a woman for the whole of the first half of the film and its
pretty full-on: as per always in a Fox/Hollywood film she is full-frontal at
all times but he is more modestly filmed. Christ, this double-standard Century
City insists upon. There is a quasi-academic article buried in the Guardian
claiming that it is all about bi-sexuality; pan-sexual the author calls it.
Completely passed me by. The academic article I would like to have read is the
one about why and how this ultra-violent pornographic ‘comedy’ pulled in $742m
Worldwide against a budget of $58m. Who watches this stuff? Young American men?
In the first twenty minutes at least a hundred people are gunned down in a hail
of bullets; without consequences. In the next twenty minutes when the women
appear, every one is dressed like someone’s call-girl fantasy and spoken to
like . . . like . . . slags/objects. Sexualised
objects. I thought, I really did, that this kind of talk went out decades ago
but here it is in Superhero films [and Westworld and GOT]. It never goes away: women make one step forward and six steps
backwards. And it’s no use telling me I need to contextualise the film by the laws
of its own universe . . .

The person I went with liked it and laughed a lot; laughed
loudest when the guy pulled the sword out of his own torso. The sword that
should have killed him. She laughed at the scene where the camera turned to
reveal Ryan Reynolds’ bum: he wasn’t wearing trousers. Tee-hee.

Later/

Done more research. Its American teenage girls that form
two-thirds of its audience. They love Ryan and they love his bum. They feel
sorry for him, for being disfigured and they love his grungy lifestyle. The
endless sexual references and profanity are a guilty thrill; the aggression and
violence, being sprayed with bullets from a high-velocity weapon and coming out
completely unharmed, just goes over their heads [or they shut their eyes]. Anyway,
it’s funny. The boinky-boinky? Well it’s everywhere now. What doesn’t go over
their heads is the referencing of their own lives, their current concerns,
current culture; the buzz, the noise, the
relevance.

SELMA

This is a 2015 film with a largely British cast that we
watched on Netflix: it has 99% positive approval in the Rotten Tomatoes
echo-chamber. I’m afraid I found it heavy-handed and tedious.

Long, long before it became the National Shrine it is today
I visited the Lorraine Motel; just a cheap run-down hotel for the underclass.
Said more about the forces ranged against King than any book, film or
Oscar-nominated performances.